Thursday, June 20

Bush makes another surgical strike on the Constitution Wake up, America! George W. Bush says that we are at war with "people who hate freedom." If so, we'd all better brush up on what we learned about "freedom" back in grade school. Think hard now. This is something more than a pop quiz. Can the US military detain and incarcerate an American citizen on US soil indefinitely without charges? The correct answer, if this is still a "free" country, is a resounding and unequivocal, no. Outside of military bases, the U.S. military has no business arresting anyone on U.S. soil, period. We fought a revolution to expel that kind of arbitrary, autocratic power from our shores. The framers wrote the Constitution, particularly the 5th and 6th Amendments, to prevent such occurrences. Was Chicago under martial law last week? Had law and order broken down? Were the courts closed? No. As such, there is no way around the fact that something deeply offensive to our constitutional system of government happened in Chicago on June 10.